The New YorkerModify

The chef Flynn McGarry was only thirteen years old when he débuted a tasting-menu pop-up in his home town of Los Angeles, in 2012. He was nineteen when the doors opened at Gem, his real-deal restaurant on the Lower East Side, and he was only a couple of years past legal drinking age when he expanded with a wine bar, Gem Wine, which eventually pivoted to become a café-cum-shoppy-shop, Gem Home. Those of us who enjoy the retrospective clarity of adulthood understand that it’s a curse to become famous as a child, to have your still malleable identity and interests forced through the fiery kiln of the public gaze. If McGarry had reached his twenties and decided to abandon the kitchen and never touch a knife again, I don’t think anyone would have blamed him. But he’s twenty-seven now, and still a chef, and with the opening of Cove, his fourth restaurant, this past fall, he’s undertaken his most ambitious project yet.

Flynn McGarry, at twenty-seven, is running his fourth restaurant.

Cove, on West Houston Street, does not mark an especially obvious step into maturity or anything narratively pat like that, because McGarry’s cooking and his businesses have never really had so much as a hint of childishness to begin with. What was both unique and fascinating about his time as a wunderkind was that, even in the earliest days, when he was doing tween-age stages at Alinea and Eleven Madison Park, or being written about in breathless profiles and skeptically snarky blog posts (not to mention a vignette in this magazine), he was never a kid speaking to other kids. There was no aw-shucks mugging, no twee riffs on lunchbox junk food: his cooking was precise, focussed, with a near-reverential attention to detail, and a high-end sensibility. At the various Gems, he cultivated a nimble and intimate sort of flavor maximalism that played perfectly in those tiny establishments. Cove is much larger, with a more formal service style, but the exactitude is still there, the sense of stylishness, the obsession and the delight. The walls are sheathed modishly in wood, and hung with dramatic botanical paintings. The tables, also sleek wood, orbit an open kitchen in which a phalanx of cooks move around their stations in quiet deliberation, with McGarry a strawberry-blond, white-jacketed flare at the center.

The dishes are simply beautiful. I nearly didn’t order a salad of golden beets with smoked yogurt, struggling to muster enthusiasm for yet another beet-and-dairy salad, but my dining companion insisted. It turned out to be amazing, a parade of roots in every shade of yellow, with bursts of brightness from what seemed like a whole bouquet of nasturtiums, orange and vermillion and gloaming purple. For all the complexity of McGarry’s creations, they remain tight and streamlined: every element is load-bearing, and the final appearance isn’t always showy. Take, for example, a bowl of artichoke purée poured around a hillock of tender Jonah crab. The smooth liquid is briny and delicate, with a subtle vegetality that harmonizes with the crustacean’s sweetness; an accompanying hunk of freshly baked bread provides a sour-edged counterpoint, enlivening things even more. For all the evident care in this dish, its plating is boldly plain—beige on beige. McGarry could easily have zhuzhed things up with a little color: a sprinkle of sumac, or a chiffonade of fresh mint, but adding any other element would have changed the flavor. He trusts, wisely, in the carefully calibrated balance of each bite.

Elsewhere, he does equally remarkable things. An oyster is poached in chamomile oil and served with wisps of creamy chestnut. A carrot is roasted to marshmallow sweetness, tempura-fried, and wrapped in charred sweet leaves of caraflex cabbage, then draped in uni and drizzled with spiced quince syrup. Like much of what’s on McGarry’s menu, it has a lot going on, but it doesn’t feel busy or chaotic; McGarry layers ingredients and flavors like washes of watercolor. On one of my visits, as the chef himself presented the grilled half lobster that is the climax of the tasting menu, he explained how the chefs “take the brains” and purée them with black trumpet mushrooms and a little bit of fennel. The resulting mixture, funky and unctuous, is piped back into the exoskeletal noggin and tiled over with caramelized slivers of the same mushroom, a glossy crown for the hunks of tender flesh filling the body below. The lobster’s claws and knuckles arrive from the kitchen a few minutes later, flashes of red in a brothy bowl of rice, with bits of mushroom carrying a note from the previous course, and meaty morsels of walnut and a crispy tuile made from dehydrated chicken stock carrying the symphony of umami onward. Desserts, too, are both adventurous and delicious. A fluffy square of cake is made with celery root and passion fruit; a huckleberry semifreddo is capped with snappy, twisting shards of chocolate and an undulating wave of preserved cherry blossoms.

Cove is nominally a West-meets-East proposition, channelling a California ethos through East Coast ingredients, but I don’t really see it that way. To me, it’s more evocative of New Nordic cuisine, the fiddly, forage-y fine-dining philosophy that dominated the late two-thousands and has more recently fallen out of fashion. And yet McGarry, quite miraculously, makes that Scandi aesthetic seem thrilling again. His multifaceted dishes are intentional, and highly composed, but still exploratory: the uncommon vegetables, the edible flowers, the house-made juices and herbal elixirs. I scoffed, a little, at the inedible landscape of pine branches and polished stones that decorates Winter in the Northeast, an assortment of small bites (including that lovely oyster) that kicked off a late-December tasting menu, but then again it made me happy. I came of age as a restaurant-goer in the New Nordic era, under the Noma hegemon; despite our nearly two-decade age difference, so did McGarry, but in his hands the approach feels unencumbered by what became, at a certain point, a somewhat formulaic pursuit of a “sense of place.”

Still, I was surprised not to detect any sense of place at Cove. The servers take care to note that most of the menu’s ingredients are sourced from the Northeast, but that’s not a terribly specific palette, and McGarry’s cooking seems to eschew riffs or recognizable references (even if the combination of Asian pear and fresh horseradish garnishing a mackerel crudo did, for me, vividly evoke the Hillel sandwich at a Passover Seder). This is my biggest criticism of Cove, and maybe it’s a little unfair: McGarry wants to make a grand statement with this new restaurant, but I cannot figure out what on earth it is. After each of my visits, I left feeling elated, animatedly recapping the meals with my fellow-diners as we wandered across Varick Street toward the train, but I wasn’t sure what to do with all my enthusiasm besides wave my hands around. McGarry’s dishes speak with such grace; they have all the subtlety and verve of an artistic thesis being mounted, and yet my meals left me without a sense of anything actually being argued for. Certainly, a restaurant doesn’t need to try to say anything—it is enough, actually, to serve dazzling food in a beautiful room—but McGarry gets oh-so-exhilaratingly close to doing something beyond just feeding people. Maybe it will come to him with time. I can almost taste it. ♦

It still feels strange not to start her day with the first milking. Unnatural, somehow. From where Helen stands, she has a good view through her kitchen window of the land she sold last month—five hundred hectares of open pasture, bordered by another three hundred of native forest. She pours herself a cup of strong tea and pictures her cows in their stalls, their udders heavy and swollen, as they stamp their hooves with impatience. She can hear the rhythmic, repetitive sound of the milking machine and smell the sharp, pungent odor of the parlor when the cows nose their way into the troughs and she attaches the cups to their teats. The new owner’s sons take care of it all now, and they do a fine job. Still, she is not accustomed to changing her habits. She puts her empty mug on the counter and observes her hand as if it belonged to someone else. It looks like a stranger’s hand. An old woman’s hand.

Helen hears Thiago’s truck in her driveway, and watches from the screen door as he ambles up her steps, making his familiar raspy, bronchial sound in greeting. He wears a T-shirt and a pair of Wranglers, his favorite, with an old checked shirt that once belonged to Helen’s brother, Paul, tied around his waist. More than three decades ago, when she arrived in Brazil to work with her brother as a missionary, Thiago was her first teacher, showing her how to place her tongue against the back of her teeth and pull sounds from her throat to speak the language of his people. Now that Paul is gone, Thiago likes to check on her. His concern makes her feel grateful, in the way that prayer used to. He pulls an envelope out of his pocket and offers it to her on the flat of his outstretched palm.

“I found this,” he says. “In your mailbox.”

Thiago brings her things. A macaw’s feather. A stone shaped like a dog’s ear. A cat in need of saving, its fur matted and paws bloody. Helen takes the envelope, squinting at it in the bright sun, and wonders for a moment what kind of bad news there is left to get from Nebraska. She and Paul heard about the deaths of their relatives in letters like this, about the slow peeling away of everyone they’d known as children. But the envelope isn’t addressed to her. It is addressed to Kim K. Siddiqi, c/o Paul Klassen. Whoever sent the letter to her address doesn’t know that her brother is dead. The thought of having to tell the story of his illness again, even to herself, exhausts her.

“It’s for the fellow with the ponytail,” Thiago says, pointing to the addressee’s name.

Helen nods. She remembers Kim. Strange name for a tall brown American. He spent six months in the area last year, on a fellowship funded by the U.S. government. She didn’t much care for him or his video camera. But then, she’s never much cared for anthropologists. Or graduate students. She particularly doesn’t care for the kind who have their mail sent to her without asking.

The next morning, Helen sits at the kitchen table, pinching one of the seed pods that Thiago gave her between her thumb and forefinger and spinning it like a top. She thinks of her brother sipping his tea in the chair across from hers, telling her about the new sprinkler system he was thinking of buying. His absence feels like something eating at her from the inside. She opens Kim’s envelope quickly, roughly. She pulls out the tissue-thin pages and reads them fast, running her fingers over the indentations of a ballpoint pen.

Dear Kim, I have not been able to stop thinking about the night before you left. Ammi has been asking every day what is wrong with me, because I am so different. I wish you could see me now. You joked that I should marry one of the boys that Ammi has in mind for me. But how can I, when I know what you and I could be to each other? I think about you all the time. I can barely sleep. . . .

Helen tucks the letter inside the front pocket of her apron. She washes her clothes and hangs them on the line, weeds her garden, sweeps the porch. She finds that the letter intrudes on her thoughts, crowding out her own words. She leans against the kitchen table and reads it again, her heart beating fast.

Three weeks later, in early October, Kim knocks on Helen’s door.

“Ms. Klassen, how nice to see you,” he says as she opens it. Kim’s teeth are sharp and white, like baby teeth, and his skin is a smooth, wheatish beige. His long black ponytail reminds Helen of the way that Thiago’s people wore their hair when they first came out of the forest, nearly forty years ago. This annoys her most of all. She dislikes a copycat.

“Morning,” Helen says. She turns, motioning to Kim to follow her into the kitchen. She has a sitting room with a low table, a couch, and a rug, but it doesn’t get much use. Paul’s reading chair is there, his footstool, and his lamp. She knows that she should put away his bifocals, which are lying face down on the table, but she likes the way they look there, as if he might still pick them up.

She offers Kim a seat at the kitchen table and pours him a cup of yerba mate. She slides the letter and a metal straw toward him and takes a seat.

“You might have mentioned that you were handing out our address,” she says, shifting her weight. Her knees hurt today. Bone spurs, the doctor in Campo Grande said. He told her she needed steroid injections to relieve the pressure on her joints, but she doesn’t like needles.

“It’s just the one person—sending me mail, I mean,” Kim says. “She kind of insisted on having an address to send stuff to.”

“My brother died four months ago,” she says. “Stomach cancer. I guess you didn’t know that.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am,” Kim says, rotating a leather cord on his right wrist. “He was a kind man.”

Helen looks down, chin to her chest. When people offer her condolences, there is never anything to say back. She wonders about the girl who wrote the letter. She points to the ragged edge of the envelope where she ripped it open.

“I didn’t know it wasn’t mine,” she says.

“No worries,” Kim says. He picks up the cup and sucks at the straw, drawing the warm liquid into his mouth. What an irritating phrase, Helen thinks. Who is it, exactly, that has no worries?

Helen asks Kim about his field work and what he plans to do while he is in Brazil. He says that this time he’s in the region for eighteen months. He plans to set up a tent in Thiago’s village, a mile outside of town, and spend most of his time accompanying the men on hunting trips farther into the forest. Once a month, he’ll walk back to town for supplies and to send and receive letters. With her permission, he’d like to come by her house on these trips, to pick up his mail. As for his dissertation research, he plans to record the elders’ songs and prayers, and interview them about their meanings. Helen points out that Thiago’s people go to the church that she and Paul helped plant three decades ago. Most don’t want to relive their past in the interior territory.

“Some don’t mind,” Kim says. “I already recorded a few songs on my last trip. I think I can do it again.”

The boy is arrogant, Helen thinks. What does that girl see in him?

“About the mail,” Kim says. “You’re the only person I know here with a bona-fide address.”

“That’s from a girl, then?” she asks, motioning to the envelope, trying to feign ignorance. She is not accustomed to lying.

“Yeah,” Kim says, taking another sip. He places the cup on the table and wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve. Helen thinks for a moment, studying the boy’s shiny forehead. She hasn’t had anything to be curious about in a long time.

“Well, I suppose you can use my address,” she says, surprising herself.

Two weeks later, Helen finds Thiago on her porch with another letter for Kim.

“Morning,” she says, waiting for Thiago to speak. Because of her knee trouble, she relies on him for an account of what’s happening in the village and in town. “Any news?”

Thiago looks out at the cows grazing and adjusts the sweatband on his wrist. Recently, he told her about miners with bulldozers encroaching farther into the protected lands. There have been skirmishes with Thiago’s distant relatives, the ones still living in isolation deep in the territory. Today, Thiago reports that Kim has been filming the men of the village with his video camera and trying to learn how to hunt wild boars.

“Can he hunt?” Helen asks.

“He’s better with the video camera than with the boars,” Thiago says, and smiles his lopsided smile. “He spends too much time looking around. Sometimes he gets too far from the group, and then we have to find him and bring him back.”

Helen shakes her head. “As if anyone has time for this foolishness.”

Helen places Kim’s letter in an old shoebox and sets the box upon a high shelf in the kitchen, on top of a stack of books. In the course of the day, she pulls the box down from time to time and takes the letter out. She studies the return address: Maryam Rehman, Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Helen tries to stay busy, but the letter proves distracting. She holds it up to the light, trying to guess at its contents. Kim probably doesn’t even appreciate these letters, she thinks. People like him are used to things coming easily.

She begins to wonder if there is some way to read the letter without Kim knowing. Then she hits upon the idea of steaming it open. She puts a kettle on the stove, daring herself to stop, then daring herself to go through with it, as she watches the column of steam escape the spout. It is a sin to snoop like this. Or isn’t it? She can’t decide. That’s the thing about being alone—there’s no one to check your behavior against. She runs the envelope through the steam so that she can peel back the flap and slip the letter out. She takes a deep breath and begins reading.

Dear Kim, I know you said that we shouldn’t make any decisions and that you don’t want to rush into anything. But I’m sorry—I couldn’t help it, and I told Ammi that we spent the night together. I thought she would be furious, and it’s true that she was very surprised. But, once she understood that we are serious, she was so happy for us! Ammi says that the best marriages come from a place of mutual understanding and trust, and I know that we have that. I haven’t heard from you. Please write to me. As I walk to work every day, I think about you sleeping alone in your tent. . . .

When she’s finished reading, Helen paces the kitchen. Then she slides the letter back into the envelope and runs a thin, invisible layer of gum arabic along the edge. She smooths it shut with the side of her thumb and slides the envelope underneath a heavy book. When she removes it, an hour later, the letter looks as if it were never opened. She feels a flicker of pride at her handiwork, followed quickly by a flash of embarrassment. It was wrong of her to pry like that.

Helen walks into Paul’s bedroom and closes the door. She looks at his bed, neatly made, his prescription pills and his hairbrush on the nightstand, his address book on the chair. She gathers the pills, the brush, and the book in her arms and lies down on the bed. Why didn’t Paul prepare her better for a life without him? She closes her eyes. Maybe I just need to rest, she thinks. As she falls asleep, she sees Maryam walking to work, Paul chopping wood. She wakes up two hours later, disoriented, the hairbrush poking her thigh.

On the first, second, third, and fourth of November, Helen watches her porch for signs of Kim. The rainy season has begun, and the air feels heavy. When he arrives on the fifth, she feels strangely impatient, almost offended—as if he has kept her waiting. They sit at her kitchen table again. This time, she gives him black tea.

Helen sips from her cup, weighing her words. “Who named you Kim?” she asks. “Your mother or your father?”

“Oh, my real name is Kamil,” Kim says, smiling. “It’s a nickname. When I was a kid, my dad and I used to play something called Kim’s Game. Do you know it?”

Helen shakes her head.

“My father would arrange a handful of objects on a tray—an old coin, a ribbon, a rock, a thimble, that sort of thing—and ask me to memorize them. Then he’d cover the tray with a newspaper and ask me to describe what I remembered. Sometimes, he’d take something away to see if I noticed. In the Kipling novel, the game is part of Kim’s training to be a spy. I wanted to be just like him. ”

It makes sense that Kim’s boyhood dream was to be a spy, Helen thinks. To seep into the seams of a place and extract information.

“Your parents are from India?” she asks.

“Close,” Kim says. “They’re from Pakistan. They moved to a town outside of Boston before I was born. That’s where I grew up. When my dad died, two years back, my mom’s best friend and her daughter moved in with us. The daughter, Maryam—she’s the one who insists on writing to me.”

Ah, Helen thinks. The gears of Kim and Maryam’s story click into place.

Kim notices a row of objects lined up on one side of the kitchen table. Several stones. An old perfume bottle. Feathers. A dried leaf. He picks up a broken piece of pottery, turning it over in his hand.

“Let’s play with some of these,” he says. “It’s easy. I’ll teach you.”

Kim reaches for the tea tray, removing the cups and saucers and placing a dozen or more items in an irregular arrangement. “Take a look,” he says, holding the tray in front of Helen. “Examine it carefully.”

Kim tells Helen to memorize what she sees. He takes a bandanna from his back pocket and lays it over the tray, so that everything is obscured from view. He asks her to close her eyes and tell him how many objects she saw on the tray.

“Easy,” Helen says. “Fifteen.”

“Describe them,” Kim says, and Helen recites what she saw, imagining the pattern they made on the tray.

“Are you sure there were fifteen?” Kim asks, and tells her to open her eyes. He whips the bandanna away like an amateur magician. “What’s missing?” he asks, peering at her face.

“The gray rock,” Helen says. “And the feather.”

“You’re good!” Kim says, laughing, and Helen laughs also. Then Kim brings another rock from behind his back, a small, curved black stone. “You forgot this one.”

“Ah,” she says.

They play again. This time, Helen gets everything right. This pleases her more than she’d like to admit. She can’t remember the last time she played a game.

“This is how I find my way back to the village,” Kim says, replacing the objects on the table and smiling with satisfaction. “When we hunt far from the village, I check for differences in the vegetation, rocks, and leaves along the path, that sort of thing. I memorize the details.”

Helen looks at Kim and sees him bouncing in his seat as he talks, his confidence seeping out like wild honey.

“You need to be careful in the forest,” she says. “This isn’t some adventure story.”

She slides Maryam’s letter across the table and watches for Kim’s reaction. She observes him as he picks up the letter and casually stuffs it into his pocket, as if he were indifferent to its contents.

“This is none of my business,” she says. “But why does the girl write to you?”

Kim looks surprised by Helen’s question. “Maryam? It’s a childhood crush, I suppose. She has this idea that we’ll get married someday. Why?”

Helen fixes a stare at Kim, assessing him. “It seems to me that if you don’t care for her, you ought to tell her. It seems to me that it would be the right thing to do.”

Kim looks taken aback. Then he gives her a grin, as if he were a naughty child who had been given an empty threat. “Yes, ma’am,” he says, and offers her a mock salute.

The next letter for Kim arrives a week later. For an entire day, Helen resists the impulse to read it. On the second day, she finds it more difficult to ignore. On the third day, she can’t stand it any longer. She boils water and steams the envelope open to find a letter from Kim’s mother.

Beta, Maryam has told me that you two are engaged. I am surprised that you did not tell me this news yourself. However, Maryam is like a daughter to me already. May Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala bless you and grant you peace, and may He join you together in joy. I am awaiting a letter from you to tell me when you plan to return home for the nikkah. Maryam is ordering the clothes now. Love, Amma

Helen puts the letter down and glances around her empty porch.

“Well, this is a fine mess,” she says aloud, as if Paul can hear her.

It is already the twelfth of December, later in the month than Kim usually comes for his mail. When he arrives, early in the morning, with a rapid knock, Helen pours two cups of tea. Kim looks a little the worse for wear. Thinner and dirtier than the last time. He probably hasn’t bathed in a week or more, Helen thinks. He keeps his hands around the teacup, as if the warmth of the drink is something he hasn’t felt in a while.

“How’s the research?” Helen asks.

Kim puts one hand, then the other, on the table. He seems to be noticing the caked mud underneath his fingernails for the first time. His smile is tight.

“Truthfully, it’s harder than I thought,” he says. “The men don’t always like to have me along when they hunt, which makes it tougher for me to do my recordings.”

Helen gets up and busies herself at the sink, glad to have her back to Kim so he can’t see the scowl on her face. “My brother used to say that we ought to remember that we are guests here,” she says. “You need something from these men. But they don’t need anything from you.”

She turns and sees Kim playing with a ring on his right hand. She wonders if he’s listening.

“I have a favor to ask,” Kim says, interrupting her thought. He pulls the ring free and holds it out to her. “Will you keep this for me while I go on this next hunt? It belonged to my dad. I’ve lost weight, and it’s gotten a little big. I’d hate to lose it.”

Helen takes a deep breath. She picks up the ring and turns it over, examining it. The band is silver, with a flat, dull-crimson stone embedded in the center. She lets the stone catch the light and sees some intricate lettering carved there that she can’t make out.

“It’s an āyah,” Kim explains. “A verse from the Quran. It says, ‘Indeed, with me is my Lord; He will guide me.’ ”

“Do you believe that?” Helen asks. “That God will guide you?”

She misses the comfort that her faith once gave her. The sureness and solidity. The routines that determined her days.

Kim pauses, considering her question. “I do, yeah. Most of the time, anyway. I like the ring because it reminds me of what I want to believe in.”

Helen sits back at the table, still holding the ring. She places it with the other objects, tucking it between a feather and two stones, and hands Kim the letter from his mother.

It’s January, and the rain comes and goes. On a dry morning, Thiago helps Helen repair the fence around her property. They work in silence, digging a trench and inserting logs in neat rows. Splitting and stacking the wood was her brother’s job, one of his favorite tasks. If she closes her eyes, she can see him raising the axe above his head and bringing it down on a stump, making a clean cut each time. It’s true what he used to say: it is satisfying work, giving new purpose to existing materials. Strange, Helen thinks, how you can live with a person your whole life and know him differently after he’s gone.

That afternoon, Helen finds herself restless. She tries doing housework, then some crocheting, but she can’t keep her mind on anything. She thinks about the trunk she prepared when she was new to Brazil and thought that marriage would be part of her ministry. She remembers the dresses she sewed from patterns, the set of enamel dishware her mother gave her, and the cotton sheets she starched and ironed. She thinks of John, her brother’s friend, and how, after he broke off their engagement and moved home to Missouri, Paul said that it would be best to take the trunk to the village and place it by the fire, so that the items of Helen’s trousseau could be divided equally among the households. For some years afterward, Helen saw the dresses she had made on other women. Once, she was offered a drink of water from one of the enamel cups and refused it. It was curious how these material objects had lived other lives that had nothing to do with her.

Before she can change her mind, Helen gets into Paul’s jeep and drives down the long dirt road toward town, past patches of knee-high grass and underbrush. She parks in front of the church and starts walking to the village. As she follows the path through the trees, she feels herself sweating, and her knees begin to ache. She wonders if she’s being foolish. Then she sees a little girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, running toward her. The girl’s eyes widen with recognition, and she turns around and dashes back in the direction she came from. Helen knows that the news of her visit will be shared and discussed. She keeps going, and, at the mile mark, as she gets closer to the settlement, she feels the hard stares of two women hanging wet clothes on a line. She hasn’t been here in more than a year, since before Paul got sick. The girl reappears, and Helen hands over a loaf of her homemade bread, which the girl cradles in the crook of her elbow like a doll. She runs to present the bread to a group of adults sitting around an unlit fire pit, and two other small children rush up to Helen, hanging on the straps of her shoulder bag as they search her pockets for candy.

Kim’s tent isn’t hard to find. The families here make their homes from local wood and dried palm leaves. Kim’s tent looks like something out of a mountaineering catalogue. Dark-green nylon, buckles, and clamps keep the frame in place, and it’s zipped up, as if he is sleeping. “Kim!” she says sharply. “Wake up!”

There is no sound, and Helen begins to get annoyed. Why is he asleep in the late afternoon? She unzips the flap and bends down to enter the tent, where she is hit with the odor of unwashed clothes. No sign of Kim. Somehow, this irritates Helen even more. She sits and looks through the detritus of his belongings—clothing, photographs, and a handful of books. She’s not sure what she’s searching for. Then, in a corner of the tent, she sees a small stack of the letters that Kim has received. Near them is a pen and a yellow legal pad, with a few lines scratched in an uneven, boyish hand.

Dear Maryam, I’ve been thinking about you and what you wrote to me about getting married. Before I go on my next hunting trip, I want to write this letter so that you have something from me, in my own words.

Helen hears an elder call her name outside the tent and replies that she’s coming. She stuffs the legal pad and the pen in her bag and walks toward the fire pit, where people make space for her to join the circle. She greets the eldest man first, a kind, wrinkled grandfather holding a giant green sippy cup. She nods at his wife, a tiny woman with long gray hair, weaving a basket. Then Helen greets everyone else, in order of her best guess at seniority. To explain to the elders that she doesn’t plan to stay long is useless. There are no short visits. And yet she is tired. After about thirty minutes, she gets up and walks to the older man, begging his forgiveness because she needs to take her leave before the sun sets. He lays his hand on her head, and they exchange goodbyes in his language. She passes Kim’s tent and begins the walk back to town, studying the path carefully in the fading light. Once she reaches the jeep, she starts the engine and drives fast, a cloud of dust puffing into her rearview and obscuring the road behind her.

When she gets home, she pulls out Paul’s box of stationery and his pen case and sits at the kitchen table to write a letter. “Dear Maryam,” she begins. “My name is Helen Klassen.”

She looks out the window, unsure of what to write. What does she want to tell Maryam, exactly? She wants to give her a warning—a signal. Then again, perhaps she should mind her own business. She gets up and paces the kitchen, considering the options. She walks into the sitting room and sits in Paul’s empty chair. If her brother were here, he might say that she should be wary of arrogance. Who is Helen to think that she has a better idea of what these young people should do with their lives than they do? She feels a wave of shame break over her. She goes back into the kitchen and puts the stationery and the pen case away.

Anticipating the arrival of letters has become part of the rhythm of Helen’s day, part of the light shifting across the kitchen floor and the cuckoo of her wooden clock announcing every hour. For the next week, nothing comes in the mail, and Kim doesn’t return to the house. Thiago brings Helen a Y-shaped stick. The year ahead stretches out in front of her, unbroken and untold.

Helen is making tea when she hears Thiago at her screen door. He looks concerned. Some of his relatives went hunting with Kim ten days ago, he says. Perhaps he should have told her before this, but he didn’t want her to worry. Early one morning, Kim disappeared. His pack with his video camera was gone, too. Now Thiago’s cousins are saying that he must have gone farther into the forest to try to locate their uncontacted relatives. “That stupid boy,” Helen says, shaking her head. Inside, she feels something stirring, an uneasy feeling she can’t put her finger on.

For the next week and a half, Thiago comes to her door with updates. His relatives have gone out in small groups on horseback, looking for Kim in different directions. Every couple of days, they go a little farther—to the edges of the protected lands on one side and to the river on the other. There’s no sign of Kim.

One night, Helen can’t sleep. She goes outside and sits on a rocking chair on the porch, alert to every rattle and wheeze of the land and the animals around her. She looks up at the sky and remembers Kim telling her that he believed that God was with him and would guide him. She thinks about the tray of rocks and sticks and feathers that he arranged in her kitchen. She thinks about how every life is a game, and how she might play her game differently if she had the chance to do it again.

A week later, when Kim’s body is found, face down at the base of a waterfall, his neck broken and his camera next to him, shattered from the fall, Thiago’s relatives say that he ventured too far into the forest. That his desire to see something that few outsiders ever do was what got him killed.

After Helen hears the news, she sits at her kitchen table for a long time, wishing she could change the end of the story. She wraps Kim’s ring carefully in an old cloth napkin, tucking it inside a small cardboard box with some of the other objects Kim played with. Then she picks up Kim’s legal pad, looking closely at the letter he started. “Dear Maryam,” he wrote. “I’ve been thinking about you and what you wrote to me about getting married. Before I go on my next hunting trip, I want to write this letter so that you have something from me, in my own words.” It won’t be hard to learn the boy’s slanted, shaky handwriting, Helen thinks. It won’t be hard to write how much he’s looking forward to getting married and how, when he’s alone in his tent, he imagines his wife-to-be. When the news of Kim’s death reaches Maryam Rehman, Helen thinks, his letter and the contents of the box will be small comfort, but they will be something. ♦

Your story “Kim’s Game” is told from the perspective of Helen, a woman in her late fifties who moved from Nebraska to Brazil in the nineteen-sixties, in order to work, alongside her brother, as a missionary to Indigenous people there. How did this character materialize for you?

About twelve years ago, an image came to me that I didn’t understand: a woman looking at her hand resting on her kitchen counter, with cows grazing in the distance outside her window. I didn’t know anything about the woman, other than the fact that her own hand struck her in that moment as unfamiliar, as the hand of someone older than her, as if several decades had gone by for her in what felt like an instant. My parents had both recently passed away, and I sensed that, like me, this woman was grieving a significant loss. In the next few years, I went down many rabbit holes, trying to figure out who this character was and where she lived. At one point, the story was set in the Rupununi region of Guyana. At another, in Pakistan’s Chitral Valley. Over time, Helen’s identity as a former missionary in central-west Brazil, and her relationship with the Indigenous community and the surrounding landscape, became clearer. The process of writing this story, in which the character appeared first and the research followed, was unusual for me.

Helen has lost her brother to cancer and seems also to have lost her faith, or at least her conviction in it. The story doesn’t elaborate, but why do you think she lost the missionary impulse after having converted many of the villagers to the church that she and her brother helped to build there?

Something that I wanted to explore in this story is how grief and loss can fundamentally alter us. For some, a health crisis can deepen faith, while, for others, it can cause a rupture. Helen did everything that was expected of her, and her brother still died. What was it all for? So when we meet her, Helen is grieving not only her brother but also the stability of her faith. And yet it’s clear that Paul’s death has opened up new possibilities for Helen. It has given her the time and the space to take stock of what she believes and to make her own decisions.

When Kim, a young man doing ethnographic field work in the area, starts having his mail delivered to Helen’s address, she is irritated by his presumption—and irritated by him, too, when he turns up on her doorstep. But he and the letters he receives soon come to matter to her more than her annoyance. Why do you think this particular, seemingly one-sided love story strikes such a nerve with Helen?

When Helen first starts receiving Kim’s letters, being annoyed with him gives her something to do, something to fill the vacuum created by the simultaneous loss of her brother, her farm, and her faith. While Helen has distanced herself from her life as a missionary, she’s probably not ready to acknowledge how similar some of Kim’s strategies for connecting with the Indigenous people are to those that she, Paul, and others in their group used when they were establishing their church decades ago. Helen likely has more in common with Kim than she wants to admit.

I think there’s a deep loneliness to her life that cohabiting with her brother kept at bay—and, now that he’s gone, she is forced to face it. As more of Kim’s letters are delivered, Helen becomes invested in the narrative they form, as if she were piecing together a puzzle, one that, in some ways, echoes her own past.

Kim’s family is Muslim, from Pakistan. So there are three forms of religion in the story: Helen’s evangelical Christianity, Kim’s Muslim heritage, and the religious traditions of the Indigenous people whom Kim is studying. Was it important to you to have all three strands at play?

I’m interested in the ways that the three religious traditions in the story overlap, inform one another, and occasionally create friction through proximity. As a missionary, Helen likely taught the Bible to members of the Indigenous community, work that involved both the deliberate erasure of their traditions and a deep commitment to her church. This project now seems to have lost meaning for her. Helen doesn’t relate to the idea of God acting as a guide or comfort, which she encounters through Kim’s Muslim heritage, but perhaps she wishes she could. I wanted to indicate that Helen feels curiosity about, and even a twinge of jealousy over, Kim’s relationship with his faith.

In Brazil, Kim is an outsider who is neither white nor Indigenous but a third category. Because he is singular in this environment, his religious and cultural identities don’t constrain his movements or ambitions but, rather, enable him to operate outside prescribed social boundaries. I was also amused by the idea that it’s not Kim’s being a Muslim that Helen finds distasteful but the fact that he’s an anthropologist.

The title of the story refers to a memory game that is played in Rudyard Kipling’s novel “Kim.” Clearly, there is a resonance between “Kim” and “Kim’s Game”—how does the story relate to the book, and what’s your connection to Kipling’s work?

I remember visiting the Lahore Museum many years ago with my mother, and her pointing out the Zamzama Gun, a large eighteenth-century cannon that sits on permanent display outside the museum and is often referred to as “Kim’s Gun.” In “Kim,” this is where we first meet the novel’s protagonist, Kim O’Hara, who sits astride the cannon in defiance of local rules. For Pakistanis of my mother’s generation, “Kim” is both a foundational text and one that raises an uncomfortable question: How do you square an admiration for Kipling’s prose with his exaltation of the British empire? Kim O’Hara, an Irish orphan who can switch between local dialects and English as it suits him, a young spy who lives by his wits and moves easily across the Indian subcontinent, struck me as a fitting namesake for the Kim in my story. I could imagine Kim’s father telling him the Kipling story in the same way that my mother once recounted it to me. I sense that my Kim, without fully registering the book’s imperial ambitions, has absorbed a sense of Kim O’Hara’s bold spirit, and perhaps wishes that he, too, could pass as a local. In a way, this rhymes with how he approaches his field work in Brazil. He’s enamored by the sense of adventure that field work requires and enjoys the ways that his otherness opens doors for him. But the reality turns out to be more complex than he expected.

In the novel, as part of the training to be a spy in the British Secret Service, Kim O’Hara is taught a game in which he must memorize a group of objects that are placed on a tray, and then describe them once they’ve been hidden from sight. This game, known as the Jewel Game, or Kim’s Game, is a popular exercise in the world of scouting. In my story, I was interested in exploring how objects might operate as talismans, symbols, and keepers of memory. I also wanted to play with the idea of a life existing as a kind of game, with its own particular pieces, strategies, wins, and losses.

You’re currently working on a story collection. Does “Kim’s Game” have a thematic connection to the other pieces in the book?

I’m fascinated by adaptation, allusion, and intertextual conversations, and by the ways in which the narratives we consume can imprint on us and transform across mediums, languages, and generations. Most of my stories are in dialogue with other texts or with films. In the fifties, my maternal grandfather owned an English-language bookstore in Karachi, and my mother made a deal with him that she could read any book in the store as long as she didn’t break its spine, so it could still be sold. She passed on her fascination, and occasional disillusionment, with the authors she encountered in the bookstore—including Kipling, Henry James, Chekhov, and others—to me and my brother. I often think about the books in my grandfather’s bookstore, and how they might have impacted the characters I write about. In my fiction, I’m interested in activating a kind of web between stories, and in creating new work that’s informed by my own cultural and literary associations, that engages with notions of influence, pastiche, and homage. ♦

In 1972, on “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson asked Truman Capote about capital punishment. Capote had written, in unsettling detail, about the hanging of two killers, Dale Hickock and Perry Smith. Carson said, of the death penalty, “As long as the people don’t have to see it, they seem to be all for it”; if executions occurred “in the public square,” Americans might stop doing them. Capote wasn’t so sure. His hands laced together professorially, he murmured, in his baby-talk drawl, “Human nature is so peculiar that, really, millions of people would watch it and get some sort of vicarious sensation.”

Capote’s book “In Cold Blood,” which began, in 1965, as a four-part series for this magazine, was preoccupied both by the peculiarity of human nature and by the vicarious sensations that peculiarity can arouse. Perusing the Times in 1959, Capote noticed a story, “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain,” about the apparently random murder of Herb and Bonnie Clutter and their two teen-age children in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote set off for the high plains.

He was fascinated, as he later explained, by “the homicidal mentality,” and felt confident that readers would share his interest. Lurid tales of real-life murders were a staple of pulp magazines. But Capote wanted to elevate this tawdry genre into art, using careful reporting, subtle characterization, and (in his own immodest explanation) his “20/20 eye for visual detail.” He announced (with further immodesty) that “In Cold Blood” marked the advent of a new form, the “nonfiction novel,” which employed “the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless immaculately factual.”

As boasts go, this one was ill-judged. By his own admission, Capote had been inspired by Lillian Ross’s 1952 account of the making of a Hollywood movie, “Picture,” which also originated in The New Yorker and exemplified the kind of narrative reportage that he now claimed to be pioneering. Worse, “In Cold Blood” wasn’t “immaculately factual.” It included not just imagined dialogue but invented scenes. One problem was that Capote disdained notebooks and tape recorders, relying instead on his memory, which he insisted was also 20/20—or close to it. “Sometimes he said he had ninety-six-per-cent total recall, and sometimes he said he had ninety-four-per-cent total recall,” George Plimpton joked. “He could recall everything, but he could never remember what percentage recall he had.”

Capote’s transgressions were serious, but there is no denying the awesome influence of “In Cold Blood,” which encouraged both readers and writers to rethink the possibilities of nonfiction. Capote hadn’t visited Kansas before arriving in Holcomb, and his book is suffused with a rich sense of place: the merciless weather, the vernacular music of local voices (“Time was wasn’t anybody here wasn’t my kin”). With the structural precision of a suspense novelist, he crosscuts between the Clutters during their last days and the ex-cons who will rob their home. Nancy, aged sixteen, writes in her diary that final night. Capote quotes the entry—it is moving in its banality—but also notes that Nancy changes her handwriting throughout the diary, “slanting it to the right or to the left” as she tries to settle on what kind of person to be.

The most startling aspect of “In Cold Blood” is its nuanced portrait of the criminals. Covering the case over five years, he came to know both men with a discomfiting intimacy, particularly Smith, the more soulful of the two. Capote keeps returning to Smith’s strange physique—his bulky upper body, honed by weight lifting, atop stunted legs and feet so tiny they could have “fitted into a delicate lady’s dancing slippers.” Like Dostoyevsky, Capote doesn’t portray his killers as demonic ciphers, instead capturing their messy complexity. The real horror is that the murderers are so thoroughly human.

A tale starting with one set of violent deaths ends with another, in the execution chamber. Capote finds little vindication there. “Nice to see you,” Hickock says to the spectators, as if “greeting guests at his own funeral.” He seems sad that no Clutter relatives are present, as though “the protocol surrounding this ritual of vengeance was not being properly observed.”

Alvin Dewey, the Kansas lawman who apprehended the killers, does attend. He recalls the first time he saw Smith, on a police-station chair, his little feet “not quite brushing the floor.” As Smith’s body jerks on the rope, Dewey sees those “same childish feet, tilted, dangling.” ♦

In Cold Blood—I: The Last to See Them Alive

An unspeakable crime in the heartland.

Once upon a time—before the U.S. began threatening to take over Greenland and treating European democracies as enemies—the Danish politician Ida Auken was a deep admirer of America. Hanging on the wall of her office at the Folketing, the Danish parliament, where she has served since 2007, are framed photographs of two U.S. Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, both seated in gently curving Danish-modern chairs. The images stand out in a setting that otherwise resembles a Scandinavian mood board: a boldly striped black-and-white couch, modular bookshelves stocked with texts on climate change, red snow boots standing sentinel in a corner.

Auken, a gregarious forty-seven-year-old, visited America for the first time as a teen-ager, attending school for a semester in Charlotte, North Carolina, while living with a local family. Over the years, and especially when she served as her country’s environment minister, between 2011 and 2014, Auken regularly travelled to the U.S., and she counts Republicans and Democrats, evangelicals and environmentalists among her many American friends. She even became fond of quoting Ronald Reagan’s invocation of the U.S. as a shining city upon a hill. Now, though, some of her constituents were telling her that they were more afraid of the U.S. than of Russia. For Auken, the photographs of J.F.K. and Obama had become reminders “of the United States I used to look up to.” Wistfully, she called them “my old friends.”

Ever since President Donald Trump began his second term, he has resuscitated American imperialism while giddily alienating allies. Canadians have been so infuriated by his tariffs, and by his glib pronouncements about making their country the fifty-first state, that they’ve embraced a vigorous new patriotism: maple-leaf flags everywhere, boycotts of U.S. goods. Throughout Europe, Trump’s upending of trade and climate-change agreements has stoked anger and sowed distrust in American global leadership.

Still, Denmark presents a special case. Rasmus Grand Berthelsen, a prominent political consultant in Copenhagen, told me that “Denmark has probably been the most American-friendly country in the E.U.” Since 9/11, Denmark has adhered to so-called Super-Atlanticism, which makes alignment with the U.S. its foreign-policy priority. The country sent thousands of troops to serve in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Fifty-two Danish soldiers died in those operations—significant losses in a country with a population of only six million. Among NATO allies, Denmark maintained the highest level of popular support for the mission in Afghanistan, even though it sustained the highest number of fatalities per capita. Because of Denmark’s unusually close coöperation with U.S. foreign policy, Berthelsen said, it has been “shocking” to see how “serious the U.S. now is about ignoring our territorial integrity.”

Trump’s ambition to wrest away Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory within the Danish kingdom, has been a weirdly persistent keynote of his second term (though he floated it in his first). And he talks as if acquiring the Arctic island—which has its own parliament but receives an annual block grant of some six hundred million dollars from Denmark—is an inevitability. In speeches and interviews, and on Truth Social, Trump has offered variations on the lines “We have to have it” and “One way or another, we’re going to get it.” To justify this expansionist rhetoric, he has cited both national security—the island abuts a naval choke point between the Arctic and the Atlantic Oceans—and a need for unfettered access to Greenland’s mineral bounty. (It has deposits of oil, gas, diamonds, and rare-earth minerals, though many caches are trapped beneath glaciers.) Perhaps Trump is simply tantalized by its bigness, as he might put it. The territory looks disproportionately large in the Mercator projection, but we probably can’t count on Trump’s knowing that.

In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. had increased clandestine intelligence gathering in Greenland. The Danish public broadcaster DR subsequently revealed that at least three unnamed Americans tied to Trump were conducting covert “influence operations” there, such as identifying residents who might join a secession movement. Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Denmark’s foreign minister, summoned a top official from the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen to discuss the allegations, denouncing “any attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of the kingdom.” In December, Trump appointed Louisiana’s governor, Jeff Landry, as a special envoy to Greenland. On X, Landry described his mandate bluntly: “To make Greenland a part of the U.S.” (Denmark has refused to accredit Landry’s role as legitimate.)

A day after the Trump Administration bombed Venezuela and kidnapped its President, Nicolás Maduro, Trump teased what might be next, declaring on Air Force One, “We need Greenland.” Katie Miller, a former Administration spokesperson and the wife of Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff for policy, posted on X a map in which Greenland’s interior was covered by an American flag. Stephen Miller then joined the fray himself, saying on CNN that “nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” and that the world is governed not by “international niceties” but by “strength” and “force.” That day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers not to fret overmuch—Trump’s goal was merely to buy, not to attack, the island. This reassurance was somewhat undercut by a White House statement on Greenland which noted that “the U.S. military is always an option at the commander-in-chief’s disposal.”

The Prime Minister of Denmark, the no-nonsense Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen, and the Prime Minister of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, have repeatedly insisted that the island will never be for sale and cannot be forcibly annexed—and that territorial integrity is a principle to be respected, especially among allies. On January 5th, Frederiksen told DR, “Unfortunately, I think the American President should be taken seriously when he says he wants Greenland,” adding, “I have made it very clear where the Kingdom of Denmark stands.” Frederiksen then observed, “If the United States attacks another NATO country, everything stops.” This defiance has rallied Danes behind her, though critics have questioned her ability to defend the homeland. On January 5th, the conservative-leaning newspaper Berlingske demanded to know how Danish defense forces would respond to American aggression, asking, “How should Greenlanders react if one day armed marines walk the streets of Nuuk, and government offices are occupied by Trump’s henchmen?” Kenneth Øhlenschlæger Buhl, an international-law expert and a former naval officer who served for forty years in the Danish military, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, told me that, according to a Danish decree from 1952, a foreign attack would require the country’s “military forces to respond to the fullest extent.” He noted that any specific defense plans would be kept secret so as not to “prompt Trump to act immediately,” adding, “That’s what I’d be afraid of.”

Although Greenlanders have had a sometimes fraught post-colonial relationship with Denmark—in 1953, the island became a part of the Danish kingdom, rather than its colony, and it has gradually adopted more home rule since then—few of them seem eager to be subsumed by a chaotic superpower intent on reviving McKinley-era colonialism. Responding to Katie Miller’s Stars-and-Stripes-stamped map of Greenland, Nielsen called it a “disrespectful” image. According to a 2025 poll, only six per cent of Greenlanders want to become part of the United States. Aaja Chemnitz, one of Greenland’s two members in the Danish parliament, told me that the talk of annexation made her constituents “quite anxious.” She now keeps in her parliamentary office a MAGA-style red baseball cap. Its one-word slogan, “NAAGGA,” means “no” in Greenlandic.

The Trump Administration has also been undermining Denmark economically, launching a sustained attack on wind-power technology, one of the country’s major exports. In August, the Administration ordered work stopped on Revolution Wind, an offshore wind farm in New England which is eighty-seven-per-cent complete, according to its co-developer, the partly state-owned Danish energy company Ørsted. Revolution Wind, which began construction in 2023, was expected to power some three hundred and fifty thousand homes in Connecticut and Rhode Island, to reduce carbon emissions by eleven million metric tons, and to create about a thousand unionized jobs. After the project was halted, Ørsted’s stock fell to an all-time low, and the company, which announced that it had spent five billion dollars on the project, sued the Trump Administration. In October, Ørsted revealed that it would be cutting a quarter of its workforce in the next two years.

Danes feel proud of Ørsted, which has succeeded financially while combatting climate change, a national priority. Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at the Columbia Business School who has co-written a case study on Ørsted, told me that wind power can generate up to a hundred and forty per cent of Denmark’s electricity demand. Ørsted, formerly a state-owned fossil-fuel company, underwent a corporate conversion experience about a decade ago, renaming itself and becoming the world’s largest developer of offshore wind power. Berthelsen, the Danish political consultant, told me, “We think of ourselves as having developed this energy and spread it across the world.” Wagner warned that the abrupt reversal on Revolution Wind would have knock-on effects for the U.S. “What European company’s board is going to sign off on a billion-dollar investment in the U.S. right now?”

Provocatively, the Trump Administration’s stop-work order cited “national security” reasons for cancelling Revolution Wind. On CNN, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum offered this rationale: “People with, you know, bad ulterior motives to the United States would launch a swarm drone attack through a wind farm.” This struck many experts as silly. Wind farms can interfere with radar-detection systems, but the wind industry has developed effective methods for countering that interference. James Rogers, an expert on drone warfare at Cornell University, told me, “The industry works closely with ministries of defense and with those responsible for air and coastal defense to make sure mitigation measures are in place.” The Pentagon approved the Revolution Wind project in 2023.

Cartoon by Edward Steed

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The far likelier reason for quashing the project is Trump’s aversion to green energy in general, and to wind in particular. (In 2011, he failed to shut down an offshore wind farm that, he thought, marred the view from a golf course he owns in Scotland.) Over the years, he’s offered, without evidence, a motley array of objections to wind power—that it’s increasing cancer rates in humans, that it’s driving whales “loco.”

The Trump Administration, again citing national security, also initiated a federal investigation of foreign-made wind turbines. The argument was that, because most turbine components are manufactured abroad, America could be held hostage by nations seeking to “weaponize their control over supplies of wind turbines and their parts.” The investigation could produce a recommendation for heavy tariffs on foreign turbine equipment, of which Denmark is a major supplier.

André Ken Jakobsson, a professor at the University of Southern Denmark, is a scholar of “hybrid warfare,” in which a country uses economic punishment, cyberattacks, and other aggressive means to harm another country, sometimes in concert with military operations. He told me, “The U.S. has been using all of its means short of conventional war in its campaign to try to get Greenland. We’re uncertain—and that is how hybrid warfare works—how to interpret some of the actions.” He mentioned Trump’s successful demand that the Danish pharmaceutical firm Novo Nordisk lower the prices of its popular GLP-1 drugs (or “fat shots,” as Trump calls them) by thirty per cent. Novo Nordisk has been another major driver of Denmark’s economy, which has been robust in recent years. So far, despite the Trump-led trade wars that Berlingske called “a frontal attack on the foundations of the Danish economy,” Denmark has proved resilient. Yet many of its citizens feel both whiplashed and confused. As Jakobsson put it to me, “Do Trump’s trade actions and criticism serve a tactical purpose with regard to Greenland? Or is this just what he wants trade-wise?”

In September, a U.S. federal judge ruled in Ørsted’s favor, saying that work on Revolution Wind could resume. But in December the project was blocked again when the Trump Administration froze leases that the Biden Administration had granted to five wind farms off the East Coast, including Revolution Wind. To Wagner, all the back-and-forth looked “erratic and vindictive.” Today, every country’s economy is tied to others, but a small nation that’s as historically dependent on trade as Denmark seems particularly vulnerable to Trump’s caprices.

Auken, the member of parliament, is, like many Danes, bullish on wind energy. In 2019, when the possibility of luring Trump away from his fossil-fuel fetish seemed more plausible, she posted a playful video in which she addressed him directly, arguing that renewable energy offers a better economic deal. She sat next to a model of a wind turbine, wearing a pretty floral top, and good-naturedly urged Trump to “listen to science, listen to your wallet, and make a new deal. It’s gonna be great.” Now, Auken admitted, it was futile to try to turn Trump green. But she clearly found his views illogical. She said, “Think about China. The most strategically governed country on the planet has chosen to invest in solar and wind, which is by far the cheapest form of energy and the fastest to deploy—not volatile, like fossil fuel. China isn’t doing this to be Goody Two-shoes. It’s an economic choice.”

Auken had other reasons to be disappointed in the shining city upon the hill, including the growing contrast in America between “poverty and extreme wealth” and the unchecked power of Silicon Valley’s tech culture. But Trump’s posturing about Greenland and his contempt for clean energy, she said, had given shape to an unfamiliar feeling. “In a very short period of time, we went through disbelief and then almost like mourning,” Auken said. “It’s like we were grieving our relationship with the United States.”

Auken has never seen herself as a contentious politician—by Danish standards, she’s more of a centrist, both tactical and conciliatory. In her office, she was casually dressed in jeans and a black cardigan, with a small gold cross around her neck. (She has a degree in theology and previously worked as a Lutheran chaplain.) She showed me her knuckles, which were skinned from a karate class she takes with other parliament members, including someone from the party she “most disagrees with.”

But now, Auken said, she was eager to stand up to the Trump Administration’s bullying. The Danes, she noted, had given the Americans “access to many things,” from personal data to surveillance technology. “All of that has to be reconsidered,” she said, including “what kinds of weapons or tech to buy.”

Auken was particularly vexed by the statements of Vice-President J. D. Vance when he and his wife, Usha, made an awkward three-hour trip to Greenland, in March. (The Vances cancelled plans to attend a dogsled race and other events after it became clear that protesters would besiege them.) Vance told Fox News that Denmark had failed to adequately secure the territory from potential Russian and Chinese encroachment, and was therefore “not being a good ally” to the United States. In a speech before U.S. military personnel at Pituffik Space Base, in Greenland, an American installation, he declared, “Denmark hasn’t done a good job of keeping Greenland safe.”

In Denmark, Vance’s fault-finding rankled in part because it was the U.S. that had chosen to pull back militarily from Greenland, winnowing the thirteen bases it maintained at the height of the Cold War down to one, Pituffik, by 2004. Berthelsen, the political consultant, said, “Since 1951, we’ve had this agreement with the U.S. that is a cornerstone of Danish foreign policy—we’ve allowed the U.S. military in Greenland. If they want to expand their presence there, they are more than welcome to do that. They don’t need to invade the country in order to do so.” As Buhl, the former Danish Navy officer, put it, under Trump the U.S. has been “kicking in an open door.”

The Danish government’s unwavering Super-Atlanticism sometimes got it into trouble with other European countries, and even with its own voters. In 2021, reports surfaced that, between 2012 and 2014, Denmark’s military-intelligence agency had helped the U.S.’s National Security Agency tap the phones of European officials in Norway, Sweden, France, and Germany, including the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. (The Danes had to make extensive outreach to European allies to repair relations.) In 2023, under the Biden Administration, Prime Minister Frederiksen signed an agreement allowing the U.S. to station military personnel at three bases in Denmark for at least ten years. The agreement was relatively uncontroversial then, but when the time rolled around for the Danish parliament to officially ratify the treaty, this past June, Danes were feeling a lot more skeptical. Welcoming the U.S. military presence suddenly seemed like making good on an invitation you wished you’d never extended to a friend you’d since soured on. Parliament felt that it had no choice but to approve the agreement, because Frederiksen had already signed it, but polls showed that voters were unhappy about it.

Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, a political scientist at the University of Copenhagen, told me, “Our relationship with the U.S., after the end of the Cold War, at least, has been based on the idea that, even with the difference in size and influence in the world, we share some common values—and that the U.S. had some kind of recipe for making the world a better place.” He added, “It’s hard to overestimate the sense of betrayal.” In a speech in March to Danish student activists, Auken wondered how Vance’s claim that Denmark hadn’t been a “good ally” sounded to “Danish mothers and fathers who have lost their children in the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

A prominently placed monument on the grounds of a seventeenth-century fortress in Copenhagen lists the names of Danish soldiers who have joined the U.S. in NATO operations. The memorial’s official title, the Monument for Denmark’s International Effort Since 1948, emphasizes a very Danish message: that peacekeeping missions and humanitarian aid are just as important as military action. (Danish casualties of nonmilitary efforts are etched into the monument, too.) The memorial’s designer, Finn Reinbothe, explained to me that the monument was “not about ‘glory and honor,’ or a Great Nation, but human beings, where the single member of society represents the highest value, and these values are not for sale.”

In May, newspapers reported the results of a global opinion study, the Democracy Perception Index, which assessed the attitudes of more than a hundred thousand people in a hundred countries toward other nations, including China, Russia, and the U.S. The net popularity of the U.S. had fallen from twenty-two points in 2024 to minus five; in Denmark, it had fallen to minus forty-five. Nico Jaspers, whose firm, Nira Data, helped conduct the polling, told me he’d been “super surprised” that regard for the U.S. had fallen “so much so fast.”

In a poll for Berlingske, ninety-two per cent of Danes said they agreed, or mostly agreed, that Denmark should look to Europe more than to the U.S. to guarantee its security. Forty-one per cent called the U.S. a threat to Denmark. This year’s annual threat assessment from the Danish military-intelligence service seemed to concur. For the first time, it cited the U.S., along with Russia, China, and terrorist groups, as a risk to Danish security. The U.S., the report noted, was no longer ruling out “the possibility of employing military force—even against allies.”

One breezy morning in Copenhagen, I met with Mikkel Hørlyck, a thirty-five-year-old who served in the Danish military and has since become a photojournalist chronicling wars, famines, and refugee crises in such places as Somalia and Ukraine. We talked in a lakeside café filled with spectators taking a break from cheering on runners at the annual Copenhagen Marathon. En route, I’d passed a troupe of blond Danes playing Japanese taiko drums and a couple of cafés where—startlingly, for an American—babies slept in carriages parked outside while their parents ate inside. (Danes are big believers in the benefits of fresh air, and the city is quite safe.) Hørlyck is tall, with shaggy blond hair, elaborately tattooed forearms, and a warm, friendly manner. “I haven’t been to a place lately where Trump doesn’t come up in conversation right away,” he told me. “They’re angry.” Hørlyck, like Auken, had seen himself as someone who “really loves America.” He described a trip he made to New York a few years ago, to accept a photography prize for work he’d done in Moldova, as “an American Dream experience for me.” (He’d been thrilled to cross paths with Annie Leibovitz, who was also receiving an award at the ceremony.) Because of the human misery he documented in his work, Hørlyck said, he was particularly upset about the U.S.’s cuts to humanitarian assistance around the world—the gutting of U.S.A.I.D., for instance. In the past, he said ruefully, he’d thought of the U.S. as a kind of “guardian angel.”

How should a Danish civilian respond to all this? Some have been boycotting American-made products. A Danish-language Facebook group that offers tips on avoiding or replacing everything from Kellogg’s Corn Flakes to HP printers has gathered nearly a hundred thousand members. “At the risk of sounding heretical, I miss raisins, God help me,” one poster wrote. In early 2025, the Danish tech entrepreneur Martin Thorborg told a business newspaper that he was avoiding American goods and selling off stock in U.S. firms, even though it felt “a bit like breaking up with someone.”

In February, the Danish supermarket conglomerate Salling Group started placing black stars on products made by European-owned companies. Salling said that it would not stop stocking American goods, but that it was addressing “a number of inquiries from customers who want to buy groceries from European brands.”

Some items have been easier than others to swear off. In recent years, Teslas had become extremely popular in eco-conscious Denmark. That was before Elon Musk, the company’s C.E.O., spent several chaotic months in the Trump Administration, crudely slashing government programs. In December, Reuters reported that, in 2025, Tesla sales fell by more than forty per cent in Denmark.

Although Denmark is known for the hyper-local, precisely assembled cuisine of its famed restaurant Noma—foraged herbs tweezered onto a plate—Danes are also surprisingly partial to Oreos, Heinz ketchup, and Coke. One night in Copenhagen, I had dinner with a documentary filmmaker who, when the talk turned to boycotts, confessed to having indulged in a Coke that day in his workshop. He mimed sneaking a drink, adding impishly, “It’s more contraband than reefer!” He’d decided to allow himself the occasional nip after learning that the Coke sold in Denmark was bottled in a local factory owned by the Carlsberg company. A plunge in sales, therefore, might cost Danish jobs.

Alexander Josiassen, a professor at Copenhagen Business School who researches consumer behavior, told me that Danish consumers are unusually attentive to “ecological sustainability and helping the less fortunate.” Moreover, most Danish citizens can afford to think about their purchases in this way: “The social safety net here is such that Danes feel life itself can hardly go wrong. If everything fails, they still have a house, a decent life, so they really have the freedom to look at other things—to act on their values.”

In May, Reuters reported that travel to the U.S. from Denmark had fallen by nineteen per cent. (The trade group Tourism Economics has calculated that the U.S. will lose $8.2 billion in spending by foreign tourists in 2025, noting that “policy-related concerns” and “harsh rhetoric” had contributed to a “negative global travel sentiment” about America.) Danes had been alarmed by media accounts of European tourists being held in immigrant-detention centers. Two young Danish women had reported being taken into federal custody in Hawaii because they’d mistakenly obtained the wrong visa for volunteer work they were intending to do on organic farms. The Danish foreign ministry, like that of many European countries, issued warnings saying that travellers to the U.S., especially transgender people, might face risks to their safety.

“I could be as famous as Keats if we had a Grecian urn that didn’t suck.”

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Last spring, Dominique Routhier, an art theorist at Roskilde University, turned down a Fulbright fellowship he’d been awarded for a research sabbatical at New York University. In an essay he wrote for the newspaper Politiken, Routhier noted that, “as a white man with his papers in order,” he knew that he would “run a limited risk” by entering the U.S. His goal was to show solidarity with “thousands of so-called ‘illegal immigrants,’ ‘criminals,’ or political opponents wrongly labelled as terrorists” in Trump’s America. Routhier told me that, although he hadn’t seen anyone else “publicly decline offers like I did,” the response to his article had been overwhelmingly positive. He’d been interviewed on Danish national TV and radio, and had accepted an offer to teach at the University of Toronto instead.

Meanwhile, Denmark, like other countries in Europe, was attempting to recruit American scientists and academics who’d suddenly lost their jobs or research funding, or who felt targeted by the Trump Administration because they worked on subjects that it disdained, such as climate change or gender. In an Instagram post in English, the chief executive of the Danish Chamber of Commerce, Brian Mikkelsen, addressed “all the brilliant researchers in the U.S. feeling uncertain right now,” and told them, “There is an alternative. In Denmark, we value science. We believe in facts.”

Last January, Prime Minister Frederiksen visited Brussels, Berlin, and Paris, in what was seen as an effort to enlist support from other European leaders in resisting Trump’s designs on Greenland. In June, France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, flew to Nuuk, the island’s capital; Frederiksen joined him there. “Greenland is clearly a wake-up call for all Europeans,” Macron said. “You are not alone.”

Frederiksen has also received support from the Danish royal family, whose long-standing popularity in Greenland has come in handy of late. The fifty-seven-year-old king, Frederik X, appears to be genuinely fond of Greenland’s icy expanses, its culture, and its people. In 2000, when Frederik was still the crown prince, he volunteered for a four-month dogsled trek with members of the Sirius Patrol, a Danish Navy unit that monitors the island’s northern and eastern edges. His two youngest children, the twins Prince Vincent and Princess Josephine, have Greenlandic middle names—Minik and Ivalo, respectively. Even some of the most independence-minded Greenlanders retain a soft spot for the royals, finding it touching, rather than cringe-inducing, when the family dons traditional Inuit garb on state visits to the territory. Nina Sikkersoq Kristoffersen, a Greenlandic activist in Copenhagen, feels that for too long Danes have expected Greenlanders to be grateful for their benevolence while minimizing the ways Denmark benefitted from the island’s natural resources. But the royals, she said, “have this not at all racist view on Greenland. Frederik talks very respectfully about it and has been there so many times.”

When the King visited Greenland in April—looking jaunty and at ease while cruising on a fjord with the Prime Minister, and taking a coffee-and-cake break with locals at a cultural center in Nuuk—the contrast with Vance’s gloomy trip couldn’t have been starker. Shortly before the royal visit, the King had issued an updated coat of arms for the Kingdom of Denmark in which the symbols for Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the other Danish territory, take up more space. In the new flag, it’s easier to see that Greenland’s polar bear is roaring.

Denmark recently pledged to give Greenlanders an additional quarter of a billion dollars in health-care and infrastructure investments. Trump’s nakedly imperialistic rhetoric has also prompted Danish leaders to look more honestly at their own role as a colonial power. In August, for example, Frederiksen issued an official apology for a program, started in the nineteen-sixties and continued for decades, in which Danish doctors fitted thousands of Indigenous Greenlandic women and girls with intrauterine birth-control devices, often without their consent or full knowledge.

Such reckonings are overdue. In 2021, Anne Kirstine Hermann, a Danish journalist, published a pioneering book, “Children of the Empire,” in which she chronicled how little say Greenlanders had in Denmark’s decision to incorporate the former colony into its kingdom, rather than granting it independence. Hermann told me, “Danes aren’t used to being the villain—we’re do-gooders. But Greenland has a whole different experience.”

Pernille Benjaminsen, a human-rights lawyer in Nuuk, said that Danes have always compared themselves, favorably, “to what happened in North America—putting Indigenous people in reservations, killing them.” But, she noted, “a lot of bad things also happened in Greenland—we had segregation between white Danish and Greenlandic people, we had eras when we were asked to leave stores when Danish people wanted to enter.” She added, “We need to kill the narrative that there can be a ‘good’ colonizer.”

Benjaminsen credited Prime Minister Frederiksen for being more forthright about the colonial past. Around the time that Trump returned to office, Frederiksen posted online that Danes and Greenlanders “have some dark chapters in our history together, which we, from the Danish side, must confront.”

Some people in Copenhagen told me that, for younger Danes, the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. had spurred soul-searching about their own country’s racism toward Inuit Greenlanders. But Denmark’s sudden attentiveness to Greenland was also an inadvertent gift from Trump. Hørlyck, the photographer, told me, “He has activated Danish people’s connection to Greenland.” Danes of his generation were asking themselves, in a way they hadn’t before, “What do I really know about Greenland? Have I really talked to Greenlanders?” He went on, “It’s quite funny that the strategy over there from Trump opens up something positive here.”

Trump’s antagonism toward Greenland has also changed Danish views about European unity. In the past, Danes had been soft Euroskeptics. They joined the E.U. in the nineteen-seventies, but they kept their own currency, the krone, and in 1992 they voted against the Maastricht Treaty, which tightened European conformity regarding security, citizenship, and other matters. When Frederiksen recently called for more defense spending, she acknowledged, “European coöperation has never really been a favorite of many Danes.” They’d grumbled, she said, about everything from “crooked cucumbers and banning plastic straws” to open immigration policies, which Frederiksen’s government had rejected.

Ole Wæver, a professor of international relations at the University of Copenhagen, told me that Danes have long had a “kind of anti-E.U. sentiment, with a lot of the same arguments that you saw in Brexit—‘Oh, it’s big bureaucracy,’ ‘Brussels is far away,’ ‘It’s taking away our democracy.’ ” Such attitudes, Wæver said, had helped to make Denmark “go overboard” in its allegiance to America. Elisabet Svane, a columnist for Politiken, told me, “Our Prime Minister used to say, ‘You cannot put a piece of paper between me and the U.S., I’m so transatlantic.’ She’s still transatlantic, but I think you can put a little book in between now.”

In December, Frederiksen completed her turn in the six-month rotating presidency of the European Council. During her tenure, she successfully pushed for the goal of European defense independence by 2030. Speaking before the Danish parliament in June, she called Europe “a phoenix shaking the ashes from its wings.” As Svane wrote of her then, Frederiksen worked with “the most powerful European leaders, both inside and outside the E.U., helping to forge a European response to Putin’s Russia and Trump’s U.S.A.” (Politico recently named Frederiksen the second most powerful person in Europe—after Trump.)

When I returned from Denmark, I kept checking in with Auken. I once caught her on Zoom as she biked home from work on a Friday afternoon, along with seemingly half the population of Copenhagen. (She chatted as she rode.) On the weekend of Trump’s Venezuela incursion and Katie Miller’s flag post, Auken sent me an e-mail with the subject line “The sentiment in DK.” Her message included a forwarded social-media post of the Danish flag superimposed on a map of the U.S. The comments below it were full of gallows humor along the lines of “Vikings were there first, time to reclaim it, LOL.” Auken told me that Trump’s threats and insults had been useful in the sense that they had prompted “Europe to get its act together”—to focus on its own defense and even pay for it independently.

But, Auken added, “it’s also a matter of recognizing that there are things we can affect and things we can’t”—including the anti-democratic direction of the United States. “Right now, it’s better and easier for us to build up Europe,” she said. Still, when Auken reached for a quote that summed up her feelings about Trump’s antagonism toward Denmark, it was from one of the most American figures imaginable. She asked, “What’s that Dolly Parton quote about the wind?” We laughed. It was this: “We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.” ♦

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Sadia Shepard reads her story “Kim’s Game,” from the January 19, 2026, issue of the magazine. Shepard is a writer and documentary filmmaker. Her first book, “The Girl from Foreign: A Memoir,” was published in 2008.